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Social Benefits of IT Outsourcing – Education and Skills Improvement

As we’d mentioned last month, we’re launching a series of blog posts, the main idea of which is to describe the social benefits of IT outsourcing and when we can, add some real stories from real people. Today we’d like to talk about the educational advantages that IT outsourcing may bring to the countries and organizations.

What exact benefits does it bring to the young developers and experienced specialists, how can you improve your professional skills using its opportunities and so on? Check the answers for these questions in our blog post.

So, according to our first blog post about social benefits, the educational advantages of IT outsourcing are:

Pushing the Universities to keep up with new trends by launching educational programs and courses in partnership with IT companies.

Let’s talk more about each of them.

Training initiatives inside the company

Training courses are not only the way of improving the effectiveness of an organization’s workforce, but they are also attractive benefits for ambitious people. Training isn’t just important to any company, it’s vital to the IT organization.

For example, Softheme provides English and Polish to all its employees during working hours. The lessons are organized and held by native speakers. Different levels, topics, and convenient time schedules are available and free of charge.

Also, from time to time, Softheme’s employees organize professional lectures and presentations for their colleagues. During such events they share their experience and skills of some particular technology or programming language with others.

Besides that, many IT companies organize educational courses for interns and junior developers inside their organizations. In such a way they can prepare the specialists with a needed set of skills for real projects.

Training centers

Last year the number of Ukrainian IT schools (private and government) was 71. Most of them are situated in Kyiv (51.1%), Kharkiv (25.5%) and other big cities, like Odesa, Lviv Dnipropetrovsk, and others. The most popular courses are in QA, Java, Front-End, Design, C#/.Net, JavaScript, and others. You can check the full list of IT schools here.

One of such IT schools is the educational foundation BrainBasket. They have launched the Ukrainian program – Technology Nation, free courses on computer programming that are based on courses of the world’s best tech universities – Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and others. It’s expected that almost 40K people will attend this program in the year.

And last week the George Soros Foundation granted a project called Technology Nation. The amount is kept secret but it’s known that this money will be spent for the building of 25 educational hubs and for the salaries of mentors who are working as volunteers right now.

Organizing IT events

If you’re working somewhere in the different IT organizations, then visiting some IT conferences or meetups could be one of the most efficient ways of sharing unique experiences. Spring and autumn are the periods with the biggest amount of such events.

One of the biggest offline-conferences for IT in Ukraine is iForum. This year it took place on April 20th. From 2014 to 2016 iForum has been gathering over 5000 participants each year. Over 50 Ukrainian and international Internet companies placed their stands and over 100 speakers participated in numerous panel discussions.

Softheme is being active in organizing several IT events during this spring. For example, on April 6th Softheme and Salesforce organized a conference in Kyiv that showed the possibilities of CRM technologies – CRM Solutions for Business. And on March 23rd there was an educational webinar demonstrating the power of Salesforce.

Pushing the Universities to be in trend with IT technologies

90% of all Ukrainian IT specialists have graduated from a university with a Master’s or Bachelor’s degree. This fact means that many young men and women choose to go into the university after they’ve graduated from high school. And at this moment they’re facing a huge problem – what university to choose. There is no question, that they will choose those universities that provide: study courses according to the latest trends and technologies; teachers who are practicing their technologies; and have educational programs and courses with leading tech companies who can provide further employment to developers with higher education.

A real person story related to education and training in IT

As we mentioned at the start, our goal in this series of blog post is not to just give you some facts, but to also share some personal stories with you. The following story comes from Softheme’s Director of Sales and Business Development:

One of the things I enjoy most of my job seeing the social benefits of IT outsourcing first hand. One of my most memorable experiences with how education in IT changes lives surrounds a young lady, “Anna”.

At first a bit of background, I will say that Anna is a good example of a two part tend: young people coming to the nation’s capital in search of better opportunities and/or parents sending their kids to the nation’s capital from smaller outlying cities and villages to have a chance to escape the poverty that is common in those areas and gain access to opportunities that are not from around their native areas.

Anna came to our Softheme Internship as a fourth year student of KPI University in Kyiv and was part of our internship that focused on developers for desktop applications and the QA approaches for these applications. She came to Kyiv with her family’s support to gain access to the IT educations that are based in Kyiv and to have opportunities (like Softheme’s internship) that could help her escape the poverty and lacking of opportunities that she had grown up around.

What I remember most is from the final days of that Internship, Anna had to present her practice project and have a set of interviews with our Team Leads and Project Managers. She was so nervous that I could see her shaking even though she was doing her best to not show this. I mean who could blame her. Here was her chance to change her life and from the very beginning of her career have a good job, good working environment, access to company benefits, good salary, and the list goes on and on. On the last day of the internship she walked out of the room after speaking to the P.M. and she had her job! She had a smile form ear to ear and was so excited that she could hardly find her phone. I knew at the very moment when I saw her going for her phone what was going to happen. As any good young Ukrainian girl would do, she was going to call mom!

This next part is what is burned into my memory. She got out an old model Nokia mobile phone that was so worn with years and years of use that you could not even see any numbers on the keys. She dialed her mom, who was even probably more nervous than Anna for the past few days, with again what was for good reason, I am sure her mom probably knew more than her daughter as how important this opportunity could be for her daughter’s future life. And when her mom answered the tears started to flow on both sides of the phone. I could hear the relief in her mom’s voice when Anna said she not only passed the internship but she also now had a job in IT! I not only understood, but I could feel from her mother’s voice that her mom knew somehow that her daughter had made it; she had broken free.

Anna today is now, as she told me a few months ago with her newest promotion in our company, a “Full Stack Developer”. She no longer uses that old Nokia phone, because she can now afford up-to-date technology. And she walks around with a sense of purpose and pride that is unmistakable. The opportunities that lie in front of her in this global IT world are endless. It was an experience to see how life was changed all due to the power of outsourcing!